Los Angeles Wants You To Be Its Surveillance Spook

Do you want to be the Nancy Drew of Venice Beach?
Well, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) has a deal
for you. The law enforcement agency announced last week the launch
of a program to get civilians to crowdsource the county’s
surveillance.

LASD has since November been working with tech companies Amazon,
SendUs, and CitizenGlobal to develop the Large Emergency Event
Digital Information Repository or “LEEDIR,” where people can upload
images or video from crime scenes.

At a press
conference at the time, then-Sheriff Lee Baca recalled the
Boston Bombing. “Law enforcement requested the public to send
pictures and video…to the FBI to assist in their investigation.
Thousands of valuable pictures and video were sent, however it
overwhelmed the service,” he said, and that LASD’s private sector
partners were building LEEDIR to overcome this kind of
challenge.

With the service ready to go, Commander Scott Edson said last
Thursday, “This is a great opportunity for the public who really
wants to catch those guys as badly as any law enforcement agency
wants to catch them.“

According to Southern California Public Radio, the
department’s “disaster and recovery response teams” will also
utilize LEEDIR.

To be fair, embracing civilian surveillance seems inevitable,
given the proliferation cellphones cameras, as well as pragmatic,
since it’s more reliable than eye witnesses (and sometimes even
valuable for
catching abusive police.)

However, the LASD’s first call
to action—not for an earthquake rescue or hunting down
terrorists, but finding more underage drinkers to arrest from a
wild party last week at a college campus—may be indicative of the
way law enforcement will typically use LEEDIR.

At BoingBoing Xeni Jardin warns that
“large citizen protests like Occupy Wall Street” could become
targets for previously impossible levels of surveillance.

Techdirt‘s Tim Cushing
adds that contrary to official claims, “there’s
no real way to submit anything anonymously. You
aren’t required to input your name, but the app itself demands
access to GPS data and any other communications-related metadata is
likely hoovered up by LEEDIR when images and video are
uploaded.”

And, while the technology itself is totally neutral, the LASD
isn’t. They’ve got a scandalous record that should make anyone
wary, and numerous law enforcement agencies have been caught

misusing and
abusing their access to civilians’ data.